If you saw a $10 bill on the floor, would you stop to pick it up? Of course you would. Then, why as a winery owner, are you letting possible future customers walk out of your tasting room without asking them for their email address so you can stay in touch with them? Have you asked them to follow you on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook?At a dinner party recently, a 50ish well-dressed woman remarked, “When we go to local tasting rooms, the staff tells us all about their wines but no one asks us to make a purchase, nor do they tell us about their wine club.”With all the challenges we face these days in keeping our businesses vibrant and expanding our market share, tasting room visitors have already shown they have an interest in your wine and are literally standing on your door step. So why are we not inviting our customers to do business with us and to stay in touch with our brand?If you think that your tasting room needs a reminder on these points, do yourself a favor and record where you are today. On a simple excel spreadsheet, record last month’s visitor traffic and the number of wine club members and email addresses you have. Now each month, update this report. Within a month, you will see a correlation between your number of visitors to your tasting room’s efforts to improve both these stats. We will discuss qualifying visitors in another post.Why is this important? Without measuring your efforts, you won’t know how diligently your tasting room staff is working on selling your most important product ~ your brand.

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